Thursday, February 28, 2013

The Real Trojan Horse in Encinitas Isn't Hinduism - It's Christian Extremism



In my previous post on the recently filed lawsuit to prohibit yoga classes in the Encinitas public schools, I promised this one would elaborate a reasonable counter-position. I'm sorry to report, however, that this project - which I still want to do! - is being put off once again. Because once I started digging a little deeper into what's behind this National Center for Law and Policy lawsuit, I got hit by a stunning avalanche of information.

 Before launching into what I discovered about the backstory behind the Encinitas case, however, I want to just note that it's remarkably ironic that the expert witness for the prosecution, Dr. Candy Gunther Brown, closed her 36-page brief with a dark warning that:
A pattern that I have observed in my long-term research on yoga, meditation, and other forms of CAM is that participation in spiritually-premised practices—even when marketed as “secular” and stripped of religious language—leads practitioners to change their religious views.

Because this process often occurs gradually, individuals may not even recognize that it is taking place or consciously choose to change their religious beliefs.
In other words: don't imagine for a split second that you can justify yoga in schools on the grounds that it's good for kids' health! No, pretty much every form of complementary and alternative medicine, or "CAM," is a veritable Trojan Horse, sneaking in spiritually damaging views that undermine Americans' religious beliefs - whether they know it or not!


Talk about a slippery slope argument! How, I wondered, did she get from critiquing the Jois Foundation in particular to this sweeping denunciation of everything connected with yoga, meditation, and alternative medicine in general? It seemed odd. 

A little more research, however, revealed a right-wing religious culture that would very much support such assertions. Which suggests that if you thought this case was simply a matter of few religiously conservative parents with some legit worries about their kids taking yoga classes in school - it's time to think again.

Of course, some parents no doubt do feel deeply concerned about their kids taking yoga, and that should be respected - up to a point. Because legally, politically, and culturally, that's really not even the tip of the iceberg.


Litigating Against "the Lie"

Here's how NPR described Encinitas parents Mary Eady's involvement in the yoga controversy: 
Encinitas Superintendent Tim Baird says yoga is just one element of the district's physical education curriculum . . . But when Mary Eady visited one of the yoga classes at her son's school last year, she saw much more than a fitness program.
"They were being taught to thank the sun for their lives and the warmth that it brought, the life that it brought to the earth and they were told to do that right before they did their sun salutation exercises," she says.

Those looked like religious teachings to her, so she opted to keep her son out of the classes. The more Eady reads about the Jois Foundation and its founders' beliefs in the spiritual benefits of Ashtanga yoga, the more she's convinced that the poses and meditation can't be separated from their Hindu roots . . .

Eady is part of a group of parents working with Dean Broyles, president and chief counsel of the Escondido-based National Center for Law and Policy.
 OK, so Ms. Eady grew concerned and took action. Fair enough, right? Well - it's not really that simple. 

Yesterday, Alternet posted an excellent piece of investigative journalism,  explaining among other things that "Mary Eady, one of the parents organizing against Encinitas’ yoga program . . . works at a Christian organization called truthxchange." 

And what, you may ask, is truthxchange?

I checked it out. As it turns out, Ms. Eady is one of four staff members of this group, which describes itself as an activist "ministry" organization. 

The site goes on to explain that the group was formed in 2003 under the name, "Christian Witness to a Pagan Planet," or CWiPP. Later, it "changed its name to truthXchange" and instituted "a new emphasis on reaching college and university students." 

http://truthxchange.com/books/

Here's how truthxchange describes its current "Vision":
Our Purpose: For God’s glory, truthXchange exists to equip the Christian community in general and its leaders in particular to recognize and effectively respond to the rising tide of neopaganism.
Our Passion: truthXchange desires to be a global communication center that broadcasts a gospel-driven worldview response to pagan spirituality as well as recruiting, equipping, and mobilizing a network of fearless Christian leaders.
 Our Plans: To train a new generation of scholars and leaders to understand and inform the Church of the challenge of global paganism . . . To engage in “antithesis” apologetics, or, as the apostle Paul says, to clarify the Truth by understanding and explaining the Lie.
Want to learn more about truthxchange's crusade for "the Truth" and against "the Lie"? Check out their 8-minute video, "Only Two Religions," which is posted both on their website and . In it, you can hear Executive Director Peter Jones explain their philosophy of "One-ism and Two-ism," which, as you might expect, boils down to an insistence that their understanding of Christianity is the one true religion, and everything else is horribly wrong.



 "Spreading the Gospel by Transforming the Legal System"

 NPR reported simply that "Eady is part of a group of parents working with Dean Broyles," President of the NCLP. But let's learn a little more about Mr. Broyles and the organization he leads. 

 According to its website, the NCLP is a non-profit "legal defense organization which focuses on the protection and promotion of religious freedom, the sanctity of life, traditional marriage, parental rights, and other civil liberties." They proudly assert a position of militant Christian nationalism:
Our nations’ founders believed that our rights and liberties are not manufactured by men, but are established by our Creator . . . 'It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. Galatians 5:1.'
But even though it is a natural right, freedom does not just “happen” by default. Throughout recorded history, liberty must be esteemed, fought for, established, and guarded if is to survive and flourish.
Today is no different. Indeed, the enemies of freedom have multiplied, and with them, we have clearly witnessed a mounting number of assaults on faith, family and freedom. Our attorneys stand ready, willing, and able to defend freedom against its enemies . . . We are motivated in our endeavors by our faith to keep the doors open for the spread of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.


Now, let's learn a little more about the lead attorney in the Encinitas case.

As explained on the NCLP website, Mr. Boyles "clerked for several years at the National Legal Foundation, a religious liberty non-profit organization." After graduating from law school, "he was invited to become an affiliate attorney of the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), from which Dean has received extensive training in pro-family, pro-life and pro-religious liberty matters at ADF’s outstanding National Litigation Academies (NLA)":
Because of Dean’s pro-bono work, he was invited to receive special training at ADF’s advanced NLA. Dean is proud to be an ADF affiliate attorney and member of ADF’s honor guard.
And what, you may wonder, is the ADF?
  
Recently renamed the Alliance Defending Freedom, the ADF website describes the organization as "a servant ministry building an alliance to keep the door open for the spread of the Gospel by transforming the legal system and advocating for religious liberty, the sanctity of life, and marriage and family":
Recognizing the need for a strong, coordinated legal defense against growing attacks on religious freedom, more than 30 prominent Christian leaders launched Alliance Defending Freedom in 1994. Over the past 18 years, this unique legal ministry has brought together thousands of Christian attorneys and like-minded organizations that work tirelessly to advocate for the right of people to freely live out their faith in America and around the world.
Thanks be to God, Alliance Defending Freedom and its allies have won 8 out of every 10 cases litigated to conclusion, including 38 precedent-setting victories at the U.S. Supreme Court and hundreds more in the lower courts.

Right-Wing Watch explains that the ADF "sees itself as a counter to the ACLU." They are well-financed, highly networked, strongly anti-gay and anti-abortion, and quite powerful. 
Unique to the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) is their collective of high-powered founders, including wealthy right-wing organizations such as Dobson's Focus on the Family and D. James Kennedy's Coral Ridge Ministries.

The ADF embodies the beliefs of its founders, harnessing the efforts of a cadre of right-wing groups with hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal. All of these groups are influential members of the Right; they are pro-life and anti-gay, and their ultimate goal is to see the law and U.S. government enshrined with conservative Christian principles.

The relationship between ADF and it's founders is one of mutual self-interest; ADF has access to the resources and networking of large organizations, who in turn are equipped with an endless supply of readily-available lawyers.
ADF's strength goes beyond their budget due to their influence with well-funded religious-right groups.

Two issues common to each of ADF's founders are their work against the right to abortion, and against the civil rights/liberties of gays and lesbians. They are particularly persistent in attacking attempts by homosexuals to have families, establish domestic partnerships or civil unions, or to be protected from discrimination in employment or housing.
On its website, the ADF lists its official "Allies" as including 13 legal groups, 10 advocacy organizations, 8 "educational" institiutions, and 8 "ministries." Many of these organizations are extremely powerful in their own right. Considered as a tight network of right-wing activists with deep pockets and literally missionary zeal, the forces lined up against the Jois Foundation's yoga program are formidable indeed. 

In this context, the Jois grant of $550,000 to fund the yoga program in the Encinitas school, while huge in the yoga world, seems laughably small. True, it was big enough to put them into the NCLP/ADF/truthxchange crosshairs. I wonder if they realize, however, just how many soldiers are contained in that battleship of a conservative Christian Trojan Horse. 

 Note: My next post will (hopefully) deliver on my pro-yoga in public schools argument as promised.


Monday, February 25, 2013

Taking Encinitas Seriously: The Conservative Attack on Teaching Yoga in Public Schools is No Joke




The time for hand waving dismissals of the conservative attack on teaching yoga in public schools is past.   

 On February 20th, a well-established conservative activist organization, The National Center for Law & Policy (NCLP) slapped the Encinitas Union School District (EUSD) with a civil rights suit, claiming that their yoga curriculum violates the California state constitution's freedom of religion clause.

If you imagine that no one could possibly take the claims of some right wingnuts who think doing Down Dog puts you on a slippery slope to Hindu indoctrination seriously, I disagree. I've studied the history of conservative legal activism and know just how stunningly (and, for many holding a more liberal perspective, unexpectedly) successful it can be. 

 This is a serious case with far-reaching implications. As such, it requires a solidly researched, intellectually sophisticated, and legally compelling response from those who believe that the option of teaching yoga in publicly funded institutions should remain open. And while I'm sure that the EUSD is working on it, so far I haven't seen any public evidence that such a well-crafted rebuttal to the NCLP's charges exists. 

 It's time to develop one. And, I believe that doing so is best seen as an opportunity, rather than simply a hassle or a threat. Coming up with a solid response to the NCLP's legal attack will require thinking more deeply into what contemporary yoga is really about. Given that American yoga culture harbors a certain anti-intellectual bias, the need for more rigorous thinking about the history and development of modern yoga could, in fact, turn out to be a good thing.

 Yoga, Spirituality, and Religion

 This is no frivolous lawsuit. NCLP has done its research and recruited some big guns. These most prominently include one Professor Candy Gunther Brown, who recently filed a 36-page expert witness brief supporting the claim that the "practices taught by the EUSD yoga curriculum promote and advance religion, including Hinduism - whether or not these practices are taught using Hindu or religious language."

 Professor Brown is no slouch. After graduating summa cum laude from Harvard, she went on to earn her M.A. and Ph.D. in History of American Civilization there. Currently an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, she is the author of three books and editor of two more, all published by top university presses. She's won numerous grants, awards, and fellowships. In short, her academic credentials are sterling.

 Brown argues that the term "'religion' should be defined to include 'sacred' bodily practices and 'spirituality':
Although “religion” has been defined in many ways . . . there is agreement among many of today’s scholars that religion should be defined broadly enough to account for the diversity of human experience and the variety of ways people set apart that which seems sacred from that which seems profane . . . 'religion' by definition includes not only theistic beliefs - like those found in Christianity - but also bodily practices perceived as connecting individuals with suprahuman energies, beings, or transcendent realities, or as inducing heightened spiritual awareness or virtues. I include “spirituality” within my definition of religion - rather than distinguishing the two - because both religion and spirituality (derived from the Latin “spiritus”) make metaphysical - that is, more than physical (including suprahuman or supernatural) - assumptions about the nature of reality.
She goes on to point out that "in the religious origins of yoga, body and spirit are not separable categories (as presupposed by Cartesian mind-body dualism), but aspects of each other, and bodily practices are spiritual as well as physical." Further, she argues, this spirituality is rooted in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain religious traditions.

She also notes that the yoga program in question is sponsored by a $533,000 grant from the Jois Foundation, whose website "includes Hindu religious content." Having checked out the Jois Yoga website (which houses the Jois Foundation site) myself, I can only conclude that an impartial jury would say this is true - see, for example, the notes on the Sharath Jois lectures under "Philosophy."
Not Wild-Eyed Fanaticism

 Could Professor Brown's claims be considered true by a fair-minded observer? In all honesty, I think that the answer here has to be "yes."



Brown's brief is serious, solid, and well-researched. It's not wild-eyed right-wing fanaticism. On the contrary, it demonstrates an exceptional degree of familiarity both with the history of yoga and some of its relevant cultural dynamics today. (For example, she quite accurately notes that many yoga teachers tone down the more spiritual dimensions of the practice to make it more accessible to beginning students. Rather than seeing this as reasonable, however, she attacks it as "camouflaging" its essential religiosity.)

 Does this mean that I think Professor Brown and the NCLP have made any sort of definitive or unassailable statement about why yoga is inherently religious, and therefore unconstitutional to teach in public schools? Not at all. I do think, however, that those of us who would like to see yoga remain available to public school students need to seriously step up our game if we're going to make a convincing case to the contrary.

 This is particularly true when you consider that this case now has to be argued in terms that will hold up in court. I don't know all the relevant legal precedent (hopefully, the EUSD legal team is busily finding that out). But as the NCLP points out, the 1979 case Malnak v. Yogi supports their position.

 Fascinatingly, Malnak v. Yogi was about the popular Transcendental Meditation (TIM) technique developed by none other than the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (yes, he of the Beatles and "Sexy Sadie" fame) himself. (As a side note, I'm also fascinated by the fact that TM is now being championed by none other than David Lynch of Eraserhead, Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, etc. fame, who is propagating it worldwide through his "Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace." As the New York Times noted this past Sunday, Lynch's "babbling dwarfs, ominous red curtains and just-around-the-corner episodes of hideous violence have become shorthand for a generation of art-house filmmaking" . . . yet, he's now invested $7 billion in his belief that teaching TM will bring about world peace. Is that delightfully weird or what? Anyway . . . )



Malnak v. Yogi ruled in favor of plaintiffs who argued that teaching TM in public high schools in New Jersey violated the First Amendment's prohibition of state establishment of religion. This was held true notwithstanding the fact that those teaching TM to students claimed it was entirely secular in nature. 

The parallels with Encinitas are obvious.

And as the movement to bring yoga into non-traditional settings such as public schools, VA hospitals, homeless shelters and so on is growing, the ruling in the Encinitas case stands to have far-reaching repercussions. If the courts rule in the NCLP's favor, then any institution with any public funding (which means many, if not most working with underserved populations today) will have to think hard about whether they want to risk offering yoga or not. 

Finally, don't forget that the conservative legal movement has been working assiduously - and often successfully - to establish a right-leaning judiciary for decades now. (Remember Bush v. Gore in 2000?) And California, despite its well-deserved crunchy reputation, is also a powerful and well-established bastion of right-wing politics. So, don't assume that a bunch of Bay Area liberals are going to be deciding this case - it could just as well be Orange County conservatives. 


 An Alternative Perspective

While I think that Professor Brown's NCLP brief denouncing contemporary yoga as an inherently religious (and essentially Hindu) is well-done, I also believe that it's wrong. 

In over 15 years of involvement in the American yoga scene, which has included studying numerous methods and becoming certified as a teacher, I've never met anyone in person who has indicated in any way that practicing yoga led them to embrace Hindu beliefs. (I have, I admit, encountered a tiny handful of people who fit this description online.)

Of course, given the breadth of Brown's definition of religion, this doesn't necessarily matter. Presumably, one could be indoctrinated into a Hindu belief framework without ever realizing this is the case, simply by accepting views such as "yoga connects me to my True Self" - which are, of course, common in the yoga community. 

Does this mean that she's right? Again, I'd say "no." Even given the most generous interpretation of her position - e.g., that believing in something called the "True Self" makes you some sort of de facto Hindu - her basic understanding of the nature of modern yoga is nonetheless simply wrong. 

There are several key reasons for this: 

 1. She doesn't recognize the integrity of modern yoga as a distinct cultural formation in the longer history of yoga. 

2. She doesn't acknowledge that the American tradition of physical education is rooted the same historical movement that produced modern yoga. 

3. She doesn't allow for the fact that both modern yoga, physical education, progressive education, and contemporary science share a belief in the reality and importance of the mind/body connection. Further, none of these traditions - which are infinitely more relevant to the case at hand than ancient or medieval yoga - has ever understood this valuation of the mind/body connection to be in any sense inherently "religious." 

Given that this post is already pretty long, I'll hold off on expanding these points for the moment. Some of my argument regarding point #1 is provided in my previous post, which is an excerpt from my new book, Yoga Ph.D. I'll say more about this claim, as well as how it relates to points #2-3, in my next post. 

 In the meantime, if you have any thoughts to share, please leave them in the comments. If I can, I'll follow up before writing up the rest of my current thoughts on the Encinitas case.



Thursday, February 21, 2013

In Praise of Modern Yoga


Amanda Rocks the Urban Yoga by (2008)




The following is an excerpt from Chapter 3 of my new book, .


When it comes to the popular understanding of yoga history today, it seems that modern yoga just can’t get any respect.

This rankles me. Because as I’ve studied the history, tracing yoga as we know it back to its most immediate roots in late 19th-early 20th century India, I’ve come to believe that the modernization of yoga that occurred at that time was, in fact, a really good thing.

Yet from the tone of the discussion surrounding the publication of Mark Singleton’s groundbreaking (as well as, to a lesser extent, other recent historical studies) you wouldn’t think this could possibly be the case. Rather than seeing the modernization of yoga as a positive, creative, and even visionary response to a rapidly changing world, most practitioners view it with either indifference or hostility.

Of course, there’re always exceptions to the rule. But from what I’ve seen, the most common response to the compelling historical evidence that asana as practiced today only dates back to the early 20th century is either to 1) shrug off one’s initial disillusionment and not care, or 2) denounce this fact as evidence of the corruption and degeneration of an ancient spiritual tradition.

And this, I believe, is a shame. Speaking as a practitioner, I believe that there’s much wisdom and inspiration to be found in the short but pivotal lineage of teachers who were formative in the making of modern yoga, stretching from Swami Vivekananda in the late 19th century to Sri T.Krishnamacharya in the mid-20th.

Boiled down to essentials, I believe that these teachers revolutionized yoga by 1) democratizing asana and meditation by making them newly accessible to all, and 2) insisting that science and spirituality are complementary practices, and seeking ways to forge new accommodations between them.

Considered as a historical development, this synthesis of yoga, democracy, and science was new – deliberately modern, and culturally progressive. Most fundamentally, it embodied a commitment to evolving yoga in ways that would make it most relevant to a rapidly industrializing, globalizing world.

Realizing this vision required synthesizing ideas and practices drawn from both Eastern and Western cultures. This fact of hybridization is precisely, I believe, what enabled yoga to become such an important force in the world today. Yet, many serious practitioners remained wedded to the belief that any and all Western influences on the Eastern tradition of yoga are necessarily negative and corrupting.

This, I think, is simply wrong – both in terms of how yoga historically developed, and how it manifests in society today. When it comes to the needs and concerns of the contemporary world, synthesizing East and West opens up critical new space for creative synergy and change. In contrast, trying to keep cultural traditions separate, pure, and isolated is not only doomed to failure, but breeds insularity, defensiveness, and mistrust.



Particularly given the contemporary yoga community’s tendency toward binary East/West thinking, it’s important to emphasize that such processes of hybridization work both ways. Consequently, the development of modern yoga wasn’t as simple as merging a wholly Eastern tradition (yoga) with purely Western ones (democracy and science). Rather, as the process of integration unfolded, each of these categories was hybridized within itself. Concretely, even as yoga incorporated new ideas and practices drawn from the West, the understandings of democracy and science it embodied became partially transformed by the East.

If modern yoga is indeed a partially Westernized practice, in other words, it’s also one that’s played an important role in partially Indianizing the West. Rather than rejecting such syntheses as impure and corrupting, I believe we need to celebrate their creativity, and seek ways to keep them generative and meaningful.

Throwing Babes to the Crocodiles

Swami Vivekananda
When it comes to the history of modern yoga, it makes sense to start with Swami Vivekananda. An exceptionally important historical figure, Vivekananda more or less single-handedly succeeded in laying the philosophical groundwork for modern yoga, as well as generating a seminal wave of interest in it, both in India and the U.S.

Born in Calcutta in 1863, Vivekananda remains a revered figure in India, where he’s regularly referred to with such honorifics as the “Father” of modern yoga and Indian nationalism (a notably significant combination). In the U.S., however, Vivekananda is no longer well known. Although he caused a sensation in the late 19th century, most yoga practitioners today have never heard of him. This is a shame, as Vivekananda’s formative role in the making of modern yoga is a fascinating and revealing story . . . 


Yoga and Democracy

While rooted in ancient tradition, Vivekananda’s presentation of yoga was deliberately crafted to speak to modern concerns. His belief that everyone could benefit from yoga broke with traditional schools of thought that held that practices of mental training and concentration should be revealed to only an initiated few. Yoga, Vivekananda insisted, should be taught and studied just like any other body of knowledge. “There is neither mystery nor danger in it,” he wrote. “So far as it is true it ought to be preached in the public streets, in broad daylight.”

This push to democratize yoga represented a radical move against the Hindu orthodoxy of the day. Indian traditionalists had opposed even Vivekananda’s presentation to the Parliament of Religions. “The Brahmanical priesthood raged and fumed against him as it is forbidden to a Hindu to cross the ‘Black water,’” recounts Bhupendranath Datta. “The educated Hindus . . . looked askance and criticized him as deviating from the orthodox representation of Samatama Dharma” (traditional religious teachings).

Yogic practices of meditation were even more closely guarded. Traditionally, yoga required an initiatory process in which carefully selected disciples committed themselves to learning at the feet of an enlightened guru. Even Ramakrishna, the Indian mystic who was Vivekananda’s own spiritual teacher, believed that meditative yoga was not suitable for “householders” – that is, ordinary people who aren’t monks. Vivekananda, in contrast, believed that if the great yogis of the past had been able to attain “super-consciousness,” then “you and I can get the same.” “Not only is it possible, but every man must, eventually, get to that state,” he wrote. “Experience is the only teacher we have.”

By writing and speaking about yoga, Vivekananda changed it from an esoteric discipline that could only be learned through a guru-disciple relationship into a spiritual technology available to all. Reflecting back on why he decided to speak at the World Parliament of Religions, Vivekananda replied:
First of all, to bring out the gems of spirituality that are stored up in our books and in the possession of a few only . . . I wanted to make them popular. I want to bring out these ideas and let them be the common property of all, of every man in India, whether he knows the Sanskrit language or not.
Similarly, in an 1895 letter to a friend, Vivekananda explained that he believed that “out of bewildering Yogi-ism must come the most scientific and practical psychology – and all of this must be put in a form so that a child can grasp it. That,” he avowed, “is my life’s work.”

If Vivekananda’s insistence on democratizing yoga ran counter to Indian tradition, it also shocked Western sensibilities that viewed Enlightenment rationalism as the height of human knowledge, and conventional Christianity as the only true religion. Western civilization, it was widely assumed, was the repository of humanity’s most important universal truths. Consequently, it shouldered the responsibility of exporting these truths to the rest of the (presumably benighted) world. From this perspective – which, at the time, seemed perfectly respectable – British dominion over India didn’t constitute exploitation and oppression. Rather, it was shining the light of Western civilization into the darkness of the heathen East. 

The British Raj in India (University of Cambridge collection)

Vivekananda attacked these assumptions on multiple fronts. And, his claim that yoga embodied a universal science of consciousness was central to them all. The “meditative state” attainable through yoga, he wrote, “is the highest state of existence . . . It is only the contemplative, witness-like study of objects that brings us to real enjoyment and happiness.” As such, yoga was deemed capable of accessing the universal ground of religious experience; one that the West self-servingly imagined attainable through Christianity alone. Yoga, consequently, demonstrated that both rational and extra-rational experiences were valuable capacities of the human mind.

Then-dominant Western conceptions of mind, in contrast, posited a sharp break between rationality and religion. Western science was presumed to embody the highest form of rationality, and Christianity, the one true religion. They were, however, separate realms. Vivekananda, in contrast, taught that yoga integrates the rational and the spiritual in ways that enhance our understanding of both. In this sense, Vivekananda’s description of yoga entailed a 180-degree turnaround in popular conceptions of the comparative achievements of Western and Eastern civilizations. Rather than the West being the sole possessor of universal truths, the East became the source of practices capable of integrating rational and extra-rational experience in ways that surpassed the limits of Western knowledge.

1886: "the sun never sets on the British Empire" - world map highlighting Britain & her colonies (in pink). Note dark-skinned heathens, wild beasts, & European worker, solider, and sailor all looking up appreciatively to the conquering Western goddess of Reason & Civilization, rightfully sitting on top of the globe - Indian man on elephant on left!

Given that Christianity and colonialism had been long intertwined in India, this claim carried significant religious and political repercussions. “Most of the men whom you send as missionaries are incompetent,” Vivekananda railed in an 1865 Detroit lecture. “I have never known of a single man who has studied Sanskrit before going to India as a missionary, and yet all our books and literature are printed in it.”
The Christian nations have filled the world with bloodshed and tyranny. It is their day now. You kill and murder and bring drunkenness and disease in our country, and then add insult to injury by preaching Christ and Him crucified . . . There is the same beauty in the character of Christ and the character of Buddha. It is not assimilation that we want, but adjustment and harmony.
Such contentions were radical – and influential. “True, perhaps only a thousand or so heard that lecture,” conceded Mary Louise Burke, looking back many years later. “But a handful of people with firm convictions . . . can slowly change the thought of a nation. Moreover,” she added, “Swamiji’s words were spread through the medium of the press, not only in reports, but in editorials.”

In sum, if Vivekananda upset Hindu traditionalists by injecting democratic values into formerly exclusive traditions of yoga, he also disturbed Western chauvinists who championed their culture as the sole repository of universal truths. In so doing, he effectively used yoga to democratize existing conceptions of human consciousness. The ability to attain higher states of awareness, he insisted, should not be limited by the cultural conceits and social restrictions of either the East or the West. By insisting that yoga represented a science of spiritual development universally available to all, Vivekananda democratized dominant understandings of religion and spirituality – and, in so doing, of the relationship between East and West as well.


 

You can read about the pre-modern roots of yoga, how Vivekananda's Raja Yoga resonates with neuroscience, why new forms of Hatha yoga blossomed in the early 20th century, how contemporary yoga is threatened by American culture's commodification of the body, and much more in Yoga Ph.D.: Integrating the Life of the Mind and the Wisdom of the Body. Copies are available via eStore and on Amazon ( and ). 

 And, if you haven't seen it yet, please also check out this book's companion volume, 21st Century Yoga: Culture, Politics, and Practice (co-edited with Roseanne Harvey) a collection of essays on contemporary North American yoga and its relationship to issues of spirituality, recovery, feminism, body image, community, activism, and more.


Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Yet Another Spiritual Sex Scandal? Screw It.


Only a little over a year ago, it was . Last fall, it was Kausthub Desikachar. Today, the New York Times published a long article on the latest "sex scandal" to hit the yoga and meditation communities, this time involving the 105-year old Buddhist teacher Joshu Sasaki:
Since arriving in Los Angeles from Japan in 1962, the Buddhist teacher Joshu Sasaki, who is 105 years old, has taught thousands of Americans . . . Mr. Sasaki has also . . .  groped and sexually harassed female students for decades, taking advantage of their loyalty to a famously charismatic roshi, or master.
 . . . Women say they were encouraged to believe that being touched by Mr. Sasaki was part of their Zen training.

The Zen group, or sangha, can become one’s close family, and that aspect of Zen may account for why women and men have been reluctant to speak out for so long.

Many women whom Mr. Sasaki touched were resident monks at his centers. One woman who confronted Mr. Sasaki in the 1980s found herself an outcast afterward. The woman, who asked that her name not be used to protect her privacy, said that afterward “hardly anyone in the sangha, whom I had grown up with for 20 years, would have anything to do with us.”

 . . . Among those who spoke to the council and for this article was Nikki Stubbs, who now lives in Vancouver, and who studied and worked at Mount Baldy, Mr. Sasaki’s Zen center 50 miles east of Los Angeles, from 2003 to 2006. During that time, she said, Mr. Sasaki would fondle her breasts during sanzen, or private meeting; he also asked her to massage his penis. She would wonder, she said, “Was this teaching?”

One monk, whom Ms. Stubbs said she told about the touching, was unsympathetic. “He believed in Roshi’s style, that sexualizing was teaching for particular women,” Ms. Stubbs said. The monk’s theory, common in Mr. Sasaki’s circle, was that such physicality could check a woman’s overly strong ego.
Since I wasn't personally impacted by this scandal or any of the others, I haven't felt like it was my place to say much about them. (I wrote one post revisiting the Amrit Desai scandal at Kripalu in light of the Anusara debacle, and one that vented my personal feelings about JF a bit, but until this post, that has been it.) But the combination of this Times article and some of the comments I saw about it on Facebook revived my feelings of irritation about the way these scandals are generally discussed in online and print media. 

Not surprisingly, the print stories tend to be basic reporting combined with whatever is most sensational and attention grabbing. Of course, in a word, this means sex. 

Online, I've seen some excellent writing about the Ansuara scandal, and particularly admire the roles played by , Matthew Remski, and . But when it comes to discussion, on the whole I've seen a lot more venting, gloating, scapegoating, denying, minimizing, and blaming the victim than reflection and learning. This is discouraging, and a wasted opportunity for collective growth.

While I don't pretend to have any answers, I wanted to share some of the thoughts I had after reading the Times article this morning, in the hope that others may find at least some of them useful:

1. It's never simply about sex. That's what everyone tends to focus on, of course. But there's always so much more involved. What I find most troubling is that LOTS of people in these communities knew that these behaviors were occurring - often for years or even decades - but either kept silent, were shut up or forced out, or rationalized and legitimated the abuse. What does this reveal about the culture of the organization? 

Consider also that these same insiders who knew what was happening were most likely also the ones most seriously invested in the supposedly deep, spiritual aspects of the scene. What does it do to individuals and communities when they are simultaneously trumpeting their light and hiding their shadow? It's a disturbing picture, to say the least. 

2. It's never simply about one bad man.  This follows from the point about widespread insider knowledge of abuse. But it bears repeating. Yes, the leader bears exceptional responsibility. But without supporters and enablers, he would not be in a leadership position to begin with. So, in a sense, the real problem is the culture of the community, particularly the central, "insider" part of the organization.

3. "Lineage" is no guarantee of anything. Kausthub Desikachar is the grandson of Krishnamacharya, who was the Guru of B.K.S. Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois. You can't get more central to any sort of meaningful yoga lineage than that. And yet the details about his abusive behavior are shockingly bad. Mr. Sasaki had his own impressive lineage in the Buddhist tradition. John Friend didn't have a real lineage, so he made one up, proclaiming himself the Chosen One of Shiva-Shakti Tantra. None of it mattered when it came to preventing abuses from occurring.

 4. We need to get over our romanticized fantasies of the "Mystic East." This extends and elaborates the lineage point above. To be sure, serious learning about Eastern traditions of yoga and mediation is incredibly valuable. But that's different from the still widespread sense that there is some innate, essential, mysterious spirituality that channels only through those who have a natural (or manufactured) connection to India, Japan, or some other Eastern Land. This is romantic fantasy and supports the suspension of critical thinking that facilitates abuse. And while abusive charismatic leaders hail from all cultures and traffic in all sorts of obfuscating symbolism, the trope of the "Mystic East" remains a central problem when it comes to the yoga and meditation scenes.

4. "Enlightenment" is a problematic concept in need of critical scrutiny. This blends over into the "Mystic East" problem to some extent for obvious reasons. But it's also distinct in that it really is possible to shift consciousness dramatically through assiduously cultivated meditative states. But it's one thing to cultivate states of deep meditative absorption when you're alone in the proverbial cave. It's another to do it when you're living in a community and/or the everyday world. Scandal after scandal - not just these three but a much longer history of the same - show us that people who are exceptionally adept at meditation may be shockingly horrible when it comes to other people. So if we are interested in what it really takes to live an enlightened life, we need to develop a much more multifaceted concept than our essentially one-dimensional visions of cosmic consciousness can carry.

6. It's facile to lecture others about "not giving away your power." Over and over again, I see online comments about we can prevent these scandals from recurring if individuals will simply realize that they should "never give away their power." This is just the flipside of the "one bad man" theory: call it the "one weak woman" problem.

Honestly, I find it quite offensive. I think a lot of it comes from other women who want to insist to themselves that they could never be so vulnerable. But we are all vulnerable in some way - if not to being sexually preyed on, then to something else. And women who are sexually preyed on typically have some deep wounding that makes them vulnerable in this way (sexual abuse in childhood, etc.). This will take a lot more to change that than dismissively telling them to stop being so weak. Really, this is simply blaming the victim. And I'm sick of hearing it.

7. We should expect complex interpersonal dynamics when it comes to highly charged teacher-student relationships. Psychologists are trained to expect issues like transference and counter-transference to come up in their practice as a matter of course. And they learn techniques to work with these dynamics responsibly and productively. Why aren't yoga and meditation teachers studying their example and adapting it to our situations? We should be, but it's very rare to do so.

8. It's past time for some feminist consciousness-raising. It is not OK to sacrifice vulnerable women to the predations of powerful teachers. No matter how much else these teachers have to offer - and it may be a lot - it's not acceptable. Period.

9. Women abuse power too. Too many complex issues to go into here, but it at least needs to be noted. Plus, it seems like the new romantic trope arising to replace the "Mystic East" (which definitely has a strong male bias) is the "Divine Feminine." I have the same skepticism toward the "Goddess" talk that floats around, if it's taken seriously at all. This is just another easy fantasy.

While the ways in which men and women abuse power are likely to follow different patterns, there is no question that this is a human problem that involves everyone, regardless of gender.

10. It's past time to develop new methods of teaching and learning that are rooted in democratic values. While this is happening in some quarters, it doesn't seem well-understood or established. But it seems clear that new models need to be developed if we don't want to keep reading the same dispiriting headlines, over and over again.


Friday, February 8, 2013

Sweet Delight and Endless Night: Teaching Yoga in Jail - Year 2

Cook County Jail, Chicago, IL, USA

The first few times I walked in past the barbed wire cyclone fencing to teach yoga at Chicago’s Cook County Jail – through the metal detector (which inevitably goes off, wanding and frisking are SOP), beyond several sets of grimy doors, and into a second cinder block building where classes are held – I felt kind of disoriented. A little light-headed. Like I had suspended breathing for a bit.

A little over a year later, this journey past the front guard-post check-in into the second, smaller check-in location feels old hat. I enjoy that the guards are pretty friendly if you look 'em in the eye and say “good morning." They’ve gotten used to the yoga teachers coming in and out on Fridays and seem to like it. Not infrequently, one of the younger ones will ask if we could offer a class for them.

Our key staff contact inside the jail, Lisa, has a beautiful personality that lights up the room. She’s gotten to know me and the other teachers by name. Little snippets of time spent chatting about this or that gradually add up into a feeling of solid friendliness and familiarity. It’s truly pleasant.

The students are good. Each of the three classes that the group I'm working with, , runs on Friday (one for incarcerated women, one for parolees on a mandatory day program (the “ankle bracelets”), and one for pregnant women) has space for 12 students. It’s voluntary; the women have to sign up. Each class is full every week. Slots often have to be rationed and rotated because there’s more demand than supply.

Compared to teaching in a studio where there can be such pressure to build up your class size, it’s incredibly gratifying to have a full class of students who not only want to be there, but are on the whole very open to experiencing yoga as something that’s got a lot more to offer than simply exercise (although that’s a key part of it too).

So I’ve gotten into a certain groove working in an environment that initially rattled me. This feels good. But it can also produce a certain lull. I can start to feel so comfortable that I lose sight of where I really am – and how much I don’t know or understand about it.

Wake-Up Call 


Checking in at the interior guard desk this morning, I received a wake-up call. I had sailed in with my co-teacher, the beautiful - chat chat, all good. She had gotten hung up at the first checkpoint due to some safety pins on her poncho that she had forgotten were there (they had to be confiscated and every pocket and lining carefully checked), but no biggie.

The young African American woman on guard duty didn't know our regular check-in procedure (show passes and IDs, sign log, get visitors pass). This wasn’t her regular station, she explained. She had just been called in to take over temporarily. So we started helpfully pointing out this and that on her desk, trying to help her get us checked in. “Oh, I think that’s the right log there! No? Hmm, maybe that one?” Fine fine. No pressure, no worries. 

A bigger, slightly older looking, blonde guard joined the conversation. “Yeah, they moved me down here last month when one of my detainees died on my watch. They took me off my regular post because they thought I was traumatized.” Spoken like standard office water cooler conversation. Although it didn't, of course, sound that way to me and Marci. We looked at her.

“Um, died . . . ?,” I said, wondering all the things you'd imagine I might be wondering. 

“Oh, he just had a heart attack,” she reassured us. “It had nothing to do with me. I just happened to be there. But because he died – they thought I was traumatized!” She gave a little laugh and shook her head, like – how silly can these overprotective jail managers be?

The young Black woman looked up from searching around her desk for the visitor log. “Huh,” she said flatly. “I just had three hangings on my watch last week and they still made me finish out my night shift.” Then went back to looking for the visitor log.

And I felt like the ceiling opened up and dumped a ton of bricks onto my sense of normalcy, putting some good cracks into my taken-for-granteds as a highly educated, upper-middle class white woman.

Back to Beauty


Marci and I finally got signed in and went to set up  for class. We knew that we had to acknowledge what we had just heard. “Three hangings?” Marci paused and looked at me.

“Yeah, I know . . . “

There wasn’t a lot of time to talk as class would start soon. And there wasn’t that much I felt we really needed to say. I sensed that we both felt the same shock of recognition, and were going through a parallel processing of it.

Then we each taught a yoga class, back to back, taking turns teaching and assisting. I got lucky; my group was particularly sweet. That sense of magic in the air that you feel in a good yoga class built and deepened. Tadasana, Tree, Cobra, Prayer.  The women brought a level of focus and heart that connected me to the poses on an almost mythological level of feeling. Practicing with them was much deeper and more satisfying than what I’d hurried through that morning at home.

But William Blake had it all right:

Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born,
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.

We are led to believe a lie
When we see not thro' the eye,
Which was born in a night to perish in a night,
When the soul slept in beams of light.

God appears, and God is light,
To those poor souls who dwell in night;
But does a human form display
To those who dwell in realms of day.



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